Christmas ornaments cap Trump’s ridiculous year

So you can now buy $150 Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ Christmas ornaments and to be honest, it makes perfect sense following his campaign strategy. I hate to say it, but with the cap, Trump really gave himself an advantage by

Read more ›

So you can now buy $150 Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ Christmas ornaments and to be honest, it makes perfect sense following his campaign strategy.

I hate to say it, but with the cap, Trump really gave himself an advantage by creating something tangible to support his brand’s message within the election.

As a very distant bystander who didn’t really absorb much of either campaign, my first thoughts of Hilary Clinton in my mind jump all over the place, as I have no definitive visual association. However, with Trump I have this image of him wearing a bright red slogan cap looking ridiculous, spitting out extreme promises.

This strong visual association creates familiarity in the minds of voters and may have even swayed those who may not have known in depth what each candidate promised for the future.

Unfortunately, that’s what it seems to be about now. At the height of meme culture, you just have to be more ridiculous and entertaining than the rest of the market to get the attention and once you have it, you can then deliver your message. If you don’t buy into the meme race then you’ve already lost a significant opportunity to hold people’s attention.

In 2015 when Drake released the Hotline Bling video, it was centred around him dancing ridiculously on his own in a minimal room with the lighting changing colour. This created the perfect template for a mountain of photo and video memes to be generated, bringing enormous exposure to the original video.

We should expect continued inappropriate appearances from the Trump caps until he’s squeezed every last drop of exposure out of it. Until we learn to prioritise real issues over entertainment, we are going to see marketing pushes of this nature.

It reminds me of learning how to write speeches in school. One strong piece of advice was to open with a joke, to engage the audience which will allow you to hold their attention through the serious parts. Obama provides plenty of examples of this as his speeches are sprinkled with good humour, which allows the seriousness of his messages to be much more consumable.

The core idea of the Trump cap meme is the same, entertain to get attention, then deliver a serious message. The only problem is that it feels like Trump never really got to the serious part.